AFTER the skeletons of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report have come tumbling out of that dark cupboard where we keep our national secrets locked there has been an outcry over what should be done. Publish the full report. Call the guilty, living or dead, to account. Face up to the past. And so on.

Maj-Gen Rahim Khan, one of the heroes of the East Pakistan debacle, has spoken out in a slightly different vein. Immortalized for the manner in which he deserted his command and later escaped from East Pakistan on board a helicopter meant to fly out a team of female nurses, Rahim has exonerated himself of any wrongdoing and put the blame for everything on Bhutto. Audacity and more audacity, urged Danton, the French revolutionary. Having made a career out of audacity, Rahim would no doubt agree.

In most other climes commanders like him would be stood up against a wall. In Pakistan which has always had a soft spot for charlatans, he continued to climb the ladder of success even after his wartime exploits had become known: chief of the general staff, boss of PIA, secretary-general, defence. Eden never recovered from the Suez debacle, General Westmoreland, or President Johnson for that matter, from the Vietnam war. We have always been kinder on our losers perhaps because we have had so few victors.

The problem, however, is not Rahim Khan but the past as a whole. How to come to terms with it or how to exorcise its demons? Air Marshal Nur Khan says the army should own up to past mistakes and thus drain the puss from its body. "You cannot live with a lie forever," he says. These are fine words but I wonder whether all that realistic. Governments and government institutions are not programmed to come out with the truth. They live with lies all the time. Not only here but around the world. It is others - lone rangers, lonely knights, toiling authors, persistent journalists - who ferret out the truth and put up a mirror to a society's face. Governments historically have not performed this function unless absolutely forced to do so by defeat, upheaval or revolution.

Consider the case of France during the Second World War. Hollywood notwithstanding, much of the French population quietly acquiesced in the German occupation. Many French functionaries openly collaborated with the Germans. There were French actors and actresses, famous faces, who kept on performing in films during the Occupation. German officers stationed in Paris faced no shortage of French mistresses. The Resistance came later and although during the course of it people suffered, made enormous sacrifices and showed exceptional bravery, there is much in Resistance folklore which is myth and fantasy, a reflection of the need to touch up one of the more shameful episodes in French history.

What was de Gaulle's greatest achievement? To succeed in restoring French pride even when the basis for this resurrection was weak and tenuous. The Free French did not liberate Paris. The Allied armies did that. But when the Allied armies were closing in on Paris, de Gaulle insisted that a division of the Free French should be the first to enter the city in order to help create the myth that the French themselves had liberated their capital. Leadership has a lot to do with the making of such myths. After the war some collaborators were rounded up and a few were shot but anything like a full-scale inquisition was avoided because that would also have put the spotlight on the ugly face of France.

Yet over the years a picture has emerged of what went on during that period. No thanks to any French government but because of journalists and scholars who have pored over lost archives and talked to survivors. Their painstaking research is what forms the backbone of the historical record.

Where in all of Churchill's writings will you find any remorse over the hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs freed from German captivity at the end of the Second World War and sent back, in most cases against their will, to Stalin's Russia? At best they faced an uncertain future; at worst a fate worse than death. Yet you will not catch any British prime minister shedding tears of sorrow over this squalid episode.

Perhaps there is a wider lesson in this conspiracy of silence. Gorbachev started owning up to the Soviet Union's past and see where it took his country: disintegration and the depths of humiliation. The Chinese Old Guard was wiser. It cracked down on the Tiananmen Square protests and thus held the winds of democracy and who knows what else at bay.

Coming to the world's greatest democracy, when has the United States chosen to live with the truth? The US has never come clean about CIA-inspired plots, upheavals and assassinations. The US government has never expressed regret, much less sorrow, over the wholesale destruction of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in pursuit of a policy now universally recognized as misguided and ugly. Yet if the truth or a bit of it is known about these distant events, if the Vietnamese experience has come to be branded on the American consciousness, it is because of the efforts of individual Americans who contributed their bit to the writing of history.

This is the difference between them and us. Governments, war ministries and the established centres of power over there live with lies all the time, being no more enamoured of the truth than institutions in this part of the world. The difference lies elsewhere. In our societies the intellectual tradition is weak. We do not ask questions, do not question authority, are not as diligent in searching for the truth. Books that should be written stay unwritten. Forget the '65 war or the East Pakistan debacle. Even as regards Jinnah foreigners have to come and do our history-writing for us.

The hard-to-speak secrets of the French Occupation, French atrocities in Algeria, America's role in Vietnam, other events: all laid bare and put on the dissecting table by individual journalists, researchers or historians. Slowly over time an opinion is created about a particular event. Fresh evidence leads to a fresh evaluation. And so it goes on, opinions being revised, fresh interpretations leading to new insights.

Sometimes fantasy and make-believe triumph as in the case of Mountbatten whose role in the events leading up to partition have been glorified by outsiders, to some extent because of his links with the British royal family. Now at last the truth is catching up with this pompous ham too who is being seen, albeit slowly, as less of a hero than made out to be. But we in this country, vigorous Mountbatten-haters, have had nothing to do with this revisionism. The books looking afresh at the man have been written by others.

When we say that the government should come out with the truth about 1971, the Ojhri Camp blasts or the fighting in Kargil we are in fact betraying and revealing the non-existence of any worthwhile intellectual tradition in our country. Governments lie, they live on lies. This is one source of their power. The truth has to be the concern of other members of a society. If they cannot perform this function it is no use asking the guardians of the establishment to unlock their innermost sanctums. That is like asking them to surrender some of their power which no holder of power does voluntarily.